Monday, November 17, 2008

Prophet has started The Lord of the Rings. He ran out of MUS books to do. Until the budget is working again, we are improvising a bit with Math. I'm hoping he can somehow catch up to Grade level. His years haven't been consistent with moving in and out of public school and it shows in his Math. Yet, he is pretty good with that untaught Math. He can do some amazing things in his head but they don't translate well to Grade level. Right now he is working on AAA Math and one of the giant all encompassing workbooks which include quite a bit of Math practice. I'm trying to get him to do some copywork every day. I would like to see him work up to some dictation by the end of the year, but I've yet to see much progress in that area. We do some reading aloud from AO 5. Right now it's Abraham Lincoln's World, This Country of Ours, and Geography. He started a very plain construction paper Book of Centuries. I figure if I wait any longer to put together the perfect one then it won't happen. For science he is reading The Great Dinosaur Mystery & still trudging along in Exploring Creation with Astronomy.

Peacemaker is working on those Ed Emberley books...purple, orange, and green. We do some reading aloud from AO 2. Right now it's The Burgess Animal Book, Our Island Story (and sometimes we do that from Librivox because her voice is amazing), The Little Duke, and Understood Betsy (or is it understanding). Truthfully I think it's overload. We cannot do that much reading in such hefty books no matter how much we break it up. I think it will take two years to finish at this point. Which seems to be what happens...it always takes two years to finish everything. He has his own plain Jane Book of Centuries, as well. Both of the boys fight to write in them, but seriously they need to learn that writing with their own hands will not kill them. He had a melt down at church on Sunday. He was embarrassed because of how hard it was to write a letter (for a soldiers care package). Everyone was so kind and helpful for him. He did amazing. His handwriting was wonderful.

Warrior is working on letter recognition. He has been practicing writing letters and the sounds they make. We use some flashcards, blank paper, the white board, and starfall.com. He is still working on pronunciation by asking him to pronounce different words everyday. He asks us, too, and that can turn into quite a fun little game.